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Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)

What should I do regarding a change in system?

  • Notgreat's proposed simplification of hunting, leave rest intact.

    Votes: 5 55.6%

  • Chapter system vastly simplifying everything.

    Votes: 4 44.4%
  • Total voters
    9
  • Poll closed .
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@inverted_helix
Would QB be willing to smooth things over a bit if we tried the improved kevlar+LARP plan? Shouldn't need to change any records, just push the investigators a little to not think to hard and not to investigate too much further. How many cubes would we have to pay him to do that?

Also, can I assume any relevant fluff from the others' plans is included in mine as well, or should I make my plan 4x larger and include all the fluff? (though quite a bit of the fluff is on their police plan, which I'm not totally sold on)
 
Meh, all right then. No chance of me directly winning, so I'll just offer advise to your plan.

I'd double check your hunting plan numbers, they aren't adding up for me. I'm pretty sure you can shuffle the green off and end up at the same cubes harvested if you buy $750 of armor. You're paying $750 for a whole megucamonth, an excellent deal (and it gives you the cheap armor for use in the future if necessary)

Your espionage is listed as -3 cubes but costs -5.

Also, I just want to make sure that you're aware of the morale penalties that we'll have for completely ruining an innocent construction worker's life. Because there's basically no way he won't be fired over this.

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Elder Haman said:
Leather clothing is suboptimal in the long run because it does not stack with Kevlar clothing. Better to get the Kevlar clothing to start with.
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You're missing that we don't always need maximum casualty reduction, and the Leather option is 2x more efficient in terms of casualties/money.
 
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notgreat said:
Meh, all right then. No chance of me directly winning, so I'll just offer advise to your plan.

I'd double check your hunting plan numbers, they aren't adding up for me. I'm pretty sure you can shuffle the green off and end up at the same cubes harvested if you buy $750 of armor. You're paying $750 for a whole megucamonth, an excellent deal (and it gives you the cheap armor for use in the future if necessary)

Your espionage is listed as -3 cubes but costs -5.

Also, I just want to make sure that you're aware of the morale penalties that we'll have for completely ruining an innocent construction worker's life. Because there's basically no way he won't be fired over this.

edit:

You're missing that we don't always need maximum casualty reduction, and the Leather option is 2x more efficient in terms of casualties/money.
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$750 for a green. As greens have fewer things they can do, it's not as good a deal to spend $750 to get an extra green. Additionally, while we don't always need maximum casualty reduction, when we do want it, we will not be able to use leather clothes for it. I understand, you're saying that leather clothes are good enough for what we want to do this turn, and next turn, and probably the turn following that even.

My point is that in several turns we will prefer to have the Kevlar. So lets get the police stuff solved, and then next turn buy vests, which give the same -2 reduction, which will allow us to do what extra leather clothes would have - and can be stacked in the future with Kevlar clothing. Then eventually get the Kevlar clothing as well. Waiting 1 turn so we don't buy leather clothing saves us $750 dollars (plus a little extra cause we pay off the debt quicker) and costs us 1 green for 1 turn. That seems like a reasonable deal considering our current situation.

As for the morale penalties, I suspect they will much more to do with Kyubey demanding 30 cubes. Definitely keep Taura away from the construction worker deception though (don't need mind reading for that, just stealth).
 
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Getting the leather clothing also gives us more flexability when we don't need maximum casualty reduction, and lets us use more people to hunt in those instances. I think leather clothing is worth it in general, even if I think we're already full up this turn on things to do.


And with the voting at 6 votes for Haman, I think all that's left is to put out omakes until Helix has done up the turn. Just checking but we're applying "Lesson Number One" and "Kaoru's Training" to the Rising Stars action, "Meanwhile in Tokyo Part 1" to morale, and "Gossip" to set Kyoko/Sayaka to TRUE, right?
 
Obviously Kaoru's Training was intended for Rising Stars action. I assume @FixerUpper intended to apply Lesson Number One the same way. I'm guessing FixerUpper might also have meant his Cost of Business to apply to the cleaning up the evidence actions, but I can't be sure.

You of course are free to decide how you want to ask your omakes to be spent.
 
notgreat said:
Also, I just want to make sure that you're aware of the morale penalties that we'll have for completely ruining an innocent construction worker's life. Because there's basically no way he won't be fired over this.
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He might be reprimanded, but there's no way to justify firing someone who's drunk on their day off. There's also no solid evidence of him being drunk on the previous job, they just can't be entirely sure one way or the other. Thus, at most, warnings, and maybe a pay dock if they're feeling spiteful and he actually does have other warnings in his file. Certainly not fired or life-ruining.
 
Elder Haman said:
$750 for a green. As greens have fewer things they can do, it's not as good a deal to spend $750 to get an extra green. Additionally, while we don't always need maximum casualty reduction, when we do want it, we will not be able to use leather clothes for it. I understand, you're saying that leather clothes are good enough for what we want to do this turn, and next turn, and probably the turn following that even.

My point is that in several turns we will prefer to have the Kevlar. So lets get the police stuff solved, and then next turn buy vests, which give the same -2 reduction, which will allow us to do what extra leather clothes would have - and can be stacked in the future with Kevlar clothing. Then eventually get the Kevlar clothing as well. Waiting 1 turn so we don't buy leather clothing saves us $750 dollars (plus a little extra cause we pay off the debt quicker) and costs us 1 green for 1 turn. That seems like a reasonable deal considering our current situation.
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Greens are still plenty useful- while I'd agree that $750 for a single green megucamonth is a barely passable deal, getting the clothes is still a worthwhile investment. For example, by getting the $250 clothes, we can overharvest to +10 and still safely hunt on the downswing. There are many times in which we won't need the extra -2% and in those situations, we can save money by only spending $250 to equip them (or $850 for -4%) rather than $1000 for the -4% kevlar clothes.

Unless we switch to a constant (non-rotating) hunt, we'll always be at +5 rotating, -6 clothing for net -1. Getting -2 clothing on the downswing will always be efficient, since we have no reason to go from -1% casualties to -3% or -5%: it's all the same either way, at 0% casualties.

@Aranfan "full up this turn on things to do"? So then why not argue for getting an extra green?

Kinematics said:
He might be reprimanded, but there's no way to justify firing someone who's drunk on their day off. There's also no solid evidence of him being drunk on the previous job, they just can't be entirely sure one way or the other. Thus, at most, warnings, and maybe a pay dock if they're feeling spiteful and he actually does have other warnings in his file. Certainly not fired or life-ruining.
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He almost had them mess up $9,000 worth of stuff. That's a pretty major thing, roughly equal to 9 months of full-time minimum-wage pay. It really depends on the margins of where he's working, but if he's not a particularly amazing worker I'd suspect that he's replaceable enough that they don't want to risk another $9k loss.
 
notgreat said:
He almost had them mess up $9,000 worth of stuff. That's a pretty major thing, roughly equal to 9 months of full-time minimum-wage pay. It really depends on the margins of where he's working, but if he's not a particularly amazing worker I'd suspect that he's replaceable enough that they don't want to risk another $9k loss.
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As far as they know, he did not cost them $9000 (ie: they billed someone for $1000, they got paid $1000). He just cost them a fuss with the police, and a potential fuss with the customer if they didn't find the error in time.
 
Aranfan said:
Because if Haman has to change the plan again, it will take longer for Helix to update. The leather clothing is worth it for the downswing you say, then it will be worth it to get next turn as well.
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Changing 1 green doesn't really change the text of the update at all. And look at last turn- Helix isn't going to get the update out slower because of a tiny change like that. We were making changes up until the end and Helix was happy since it made it look like there was less of a delay.

Now, the next part I could see you making that argument for, but not for 1 green.
Kinematics said:
As far as they know, he did not cost them $9000
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Aye, but the mistake almost cost them 9k. From their point of view, they got very lucky that the mistake happened after the payment and not before, but as far as I can tell there's nothing to indicate that it couldn't happen earlier. Well, I guess it's kinda the opposite, but that sort of money is still very significant. Plus, I kinda doubt that they don't have programs set up that will detect the 9k overpay that we're making it appear someone else did. (whoever we're swapping with) We may be able to change that one as well, but now we're just adding more and more things on.
Then again, there's a good chance their software doesn't double-check things, which would mean we're safe. Cheap outsourced software for the win? Not to mention they can still talk to the neighbors and they'll agree that it certainly sounded pretty bad. They might wait a few days before contacting their worker- it's been a month, surely the police can wait another few days.

I seriously think that the improved kevlar plan is much better. Either remove the damage entirely (15 cubes) and things appear pretty good- they have a question (why did they buy a ton of kevlar), and get an answer. Remember, buying kevlar isn't illegal. We show them that we had a legitimate reason for doing it, they'll get off our backs. More importantly, it doesn't involve us trying to mess with another company's systems- systems that we may not fully understand.
If you want to be risky don't remove the damage at all and go for the 'failed test' plan. This has the potential of not needing any cubes lost beyond the enchantment research itself (something that we want to get done anyway).
While we might get a little attention, it will be positive attention. And we own a moderately large courier business, there's no way we'll be totally anonymous. If we open up the restaurant, we'll be so clearly not anonymous it won't even be funny. A little attention on us won't hurt as long as we keep up the "it's not a viable product yet" and "we don't want to reveal our process".

I'll work on getting specific numbers if anyone cares, but I don't see how I can beat a 6-1 vote deficit. So my goal is to convince Elder Haman. Definitely not making the restaurant this turn though, can't afford the negative synergy with the police investigation, and the chance of getting the reduced payment is worth it.
 
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Elder Haman said:
Obviously Kaoru's Training was intended for Rising Stars action. I assume @FixerUpper intended to apply Lesson Number One the same way. I'm guessing FixerUpper might also have meant his Cost of Business to apply to the cleaning up the evidence actions, but I can't be sure.

You of course are free to decide how you want to ask your omakes to be spent.
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I tend to be pretty lax about how bonuses are applied to my omakes. Inverted_Helix has had to poke me before to get me to choose, but yes, Lesson Number One's specifically to help facilitate the Elite training process. Cost of Business is me going 'Kyouko would never stand for this let's see what she has to say.' Bonus-wise, I'll trust Helix to think of something appropriate for it.
 
inverted_helix said:
They're far more daunting to me! Getting kind of silly really but not sure how to deal with that. Particularly since I'm encouraging thinking things through with this quest. What's surprising to me is that it hasn't resulted in only one plan like you often see with long planning type quests. Though it may have scared off votes.
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Empire quests tend to bog down into extremely complex micromanagement.

it's one reason why the Dynasty format is so popular, since it converts the huge block of resource management into specific actions that allocate resources automatically. which makes it more accessible than...well an accounting spreadsheet.
 
So I'm just going to brainstorm about possible and probable failure modes for meguca organizations, based on what we know now and didn't know during the first updates.

Money: Running an organization costs money. So does affording the various mundane assests that are lifesavers like phones and shields, and that's not even mentioning keeping the girls in food and water. We got lucky with our first turn jobsearch succeeding like it did. Otherwise we might have been forced to turn to crime, with all the attendant morale and attention penalties. So money problems is a definite failure mode.

Morale Failure: According to Helix a single hunting death in the first month would have caused us to lose a lot more girls to spirals. A run of bad luck hunting in the initial months could have the rank and file girls give up on the idea of a big organization as not being safer enough to be worth giving up the independence of the wild.

Demons: Assuming an organization manages to establish itself, it is entirely possible for them to be too successful building up a stockpile/surplus of grief cubes and thereby drive demon strength up to such high levels that they die fast enough to tank morale and fall apart. And there are problems underhunting too. Basically the longer an organization is ignorant of the sustainable hunting equation and human-demon-meguca carrying capacity dynamics, the higher the chance of it biting them in the ass.

Insufficient Secrecy: More a problem for the groups that fund themselves through crime, since that is sure to attract attention from both sides of the law, but still a concern for non-criminal groups. If you piss off Kyuubey enough by threatening the masquerade your organization is basically dead.

Open Conflict: Actual physical conflict between magical girls would be a massive drain on both manpower and grief cube supplies. The loss of which can easily tank an organization even if it wins the physical skirmishes.

Resource Denial: The sustainability equation is a harsh mistress. Sustained poaching by either another organization or by smaller groups of wild meguca can do terrible things to demon strength and therefore to cube stockpiles, casualty rates, turnover, and morale.

Bad Luck on the Spiral Roll: Between Madoka looking out for us and Keiko's kitten mulcher we haven't really seen this yet, but the spiral mechanic is a loaded gun to the head of any puella organization. Spirals consume both cubes and girls, massively draining resources. A run of bad luck on the spiral roll can leave a previously strong group a gutted wreck, and shatter one that's already in trouble.

Bad Luck in General: The dice giveth, and the dice taketh away. Bad luck can be anything from hunting poorly to hunting too well, from not making enough money to doing too well on the job, from Kyuubey not contracting enough girls to replace losses to Kyuubey bringing you too many girls to sustain. While not as fatal as some of the other problems outlined, if an organization is spending every turn putting out the fires from last turn, they are much more vulnerable to any of the above problems.

OCP: Helix has hinted repeatedly that there are mechanics we haven't figured out yet, feedback cycles we haven't tripped, and even an "arc boss" we don't know anything about. This being a Puella Magi quest I fully expect these things to shank us in the back out of nowhere.


Summary: We have been amazingly lucky.
 
Keiko! Get the kitten mulcher working overtime.

On a more serious note, I think we want to get a to at least a 3 month stockpile of grief cubes. That would give us the time we need to respond to a serious problem.
 
Elder Haman said:
I think we want to get a to at least a 3 month stockpile of grief cubes.
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Assuming no expansion in organizational size or territory, and nothing disruptive happens (so basically frictionless spherical cow), with our population of 47 girls (Ayase doesn't count for this), an average of 5 cubes per turn consumed by spiral mitigation (# pulled out of my ass), and a sustainable 64 seeds harvested each turn with crop rotation on average. It would take:

(64-47-5)X=47*2
(64-53)X=94
(11)X=94
X = 94/11

Approximately 9 months to accumulate that surplus over the one month stockpile we currently almost have. Longer thanks to Kyuubey's fine and other things I didn't account for.

I'd love a 3 month stockpile, but it's not gonna happen any time soon, especially with all the ways we can usefully spend grief cubes.
 
I would probably aim for a 10% cube surplus per turn, over nominal upkeep. That is, for our population, +5 cubes to the reserves per turn after all costs and grief spirals. That gives a full month stockpile per year of activity, roughly.

For the very long term, a 3 month stockpile is probably about the maximum for pure reserves. That would be sufficient to feed an organization over the course of a winnable war without needing to hunt at all (though it's still preferable that some hunting be done, it's more likely to be poaching on both sides). If it takes more than three months of all-out fighting, you were never going to win to start with.

A 3 month stockpile should be achievable for a 4-year-old organization, with the assumption that the first year was spent just scraping by, not building reserves.
 
Aranfan said:
possible and probable failure modes for meguca organizations
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I've been rather lazy with not charging you a food/life essentials budget for your girls from the start, though to a degree the stipend probably covers that.

These are the main ones I've thought of really. The fact that you managed to avoid everything so well that you didn't really take any significant losses is rather impressive.
 
inverted_helix said:
I've been rather lazy with not charging you a food/life essentials budget for your girls from the start, though to a degree the stipend probably covers that.

These are the main ones I've thought of really. The fact that you managed to avoid everything so well that you didn't really take any significant losses is rather impressive.
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Now imagine the police situation if we had average casualty rates...
 
inverted_helix said:
I've been rather lazy with not charging you a food/life essentials budget for your girls from the start, though to a degree the stipend probably covers that.
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As much as it would make the quest harder, I would actually like it if you did start charging us this. Not for all, the parents of the girls who have them will cover some of it, but an abstraction similar to how housing works would be good. It would also make money more useful.

inverted_helix said:
These are the main ones I've thought of really. The fact that you managed to avoid everything so well that you didn't really take any significant losses is rather impressive.
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We are in a pretty good position, but that just means most of the problems that could occur will be merely crippling instead of fatal. Even as relatively smooth sailing as it's been for us, it still feels almost like a tightrope.
 
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